LAZAR BARANOVYCH’S EPISTOLARY AS A SOURCE FOR STUDYING THE DYNAMICS OF THE PHRASEOLOGICAL COMPOSITION IN UKRAINIAN OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 17TH CENTURY

Abstract

Lazar Baranovych’s epistolary heritage in Ukrainian studies has not found proper elaboration, though upon the presentation of a fragment of the Archbishop of Chernihiv’s work, it was and still remains the source of the study of the linguistic situation in the second half of the 17th century. The intermediate status of the genre of correspondence allowed L. Baranovych to go beyond the traditional church-formal style. Recorded phraseological units, which are different in origin, demonstrate the ability of the cleric to choose not only the language of correspondence depending on the final destination, but also set expressions that add emphasis and individuality to letters. Most often we find phraseological units in religious, domestic and professional spheres. They testify to both lexical and morphological variability, but we do observe cases of semantic transformation, when phraseological unit, known at the time in Ukrainian literary language, acquires a new meaning due to the contextual environment. L. Baranovych resorts to the contamination of phraseological units: this phrase-making is carried out by the Archbishop of Chernihiv mainly with set expressions with the Holy Scripture as their source.
 The analyzed letters testify that most of the recorded phraseological units have a negative connotation as a result, on the one hand, of mental critical attitude of Ukrainians to their actions, doings, character traits, on the other – the situation in Ukrainian society of the Ruins era, which significantly affected the church.
 Most recorded phraseological units are verb-preposition-noun or verb-noun constructions. Some of them are characterized by the presence of optional components, which can be adjectives, pronouns, verbs and which, while extending the set structure, specify semantics of the phraseological unit. Word order in phraseological units does not yet have a clear consolidation, which allows to distinguish the so-called inversion variants.
 Epistolary of Lazar Baranovych testifies to the formation of systemic relations in phraseological composition of the Ukrainian language in the second half of the 17th century. Borrowed or calqued phraseological units engage in synonymous and antonymic relationships with each other or with Church Slavonic or Ukrainian, creating a linguistic competition between the Church’s written tradition and the element of life.
 Historical development of phraseological system of L. Baranovych’s letters has shown that the analyzed set expressions with corresponding lexical and grammatical transformations were inherited by the new Ukrainian language, which proves the continuity of the development not only of phrasicon, but of the Ukrainian language as a whole.